


A Change of Heart

by MJosephine10



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, I guess you could call it angst, idylls of the king, lancelot and elaine - Freeform, look i had this assignment in highschool, so i did, where i had to rewrite the ending of their story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 17:11:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8293546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MJosephine10/pseuds/MJosephine10
Summary: So I wrote this in high school for an assignment where we had to rewrite the ending of idylls of the king. The prompt was "Imagine Elaine hadn't died and Lancelot went back to Astolat." I never liked their story so rewriting it was a truly deep joy for me.





	

The trees were full of blossoms; the ground was newly clothed with fresh green grass. Happiness and hope were in the air. And Lancelot, too, was filled with hope. The spring air made him feel that all might not be lost.

He had mended. His wicked affair with Guinevere, the pearl of beauty, was ended. There was hope that she, Elaine, might forgive him too. Forgive what he did not know, for he had done her no offense, but as he remembered her heart-broken face and childish misery he shuddered. The feeling that he had wounded and broken something very innocent haunted him and he longed to see her again.

Did her love her? Lancelot himself did not know the answer. He thought of her often, with pity, with grief, with even a kind of admiration but whether he thought of her with love he could not tell.

He came and requested entrance at the castle gate and was admitted as a weary lodger. He created no stir in the old castle, his presence aroused no curiosity. His face was white and drawn and creased with lines of worry and care. About his whole aspect a certain sadness hung and in his blue eyes a longing burned so ardently that Elaine's father and brothers no longer recognized the bold and fearless "flower of knighthood" whom once they had welcomed in those very halls.

In the great hall, pilgrims in poor attire and weary travelers like himself gathered for the evening meal. Most were simple folk, poor and plain, but there were a few, like himself, who bore the mark of knighthood- on some great quest, perhaps, or stopping there on their journey home. All were welcomed warmly and graciously; the same treatment was bestowed upon all.

And then, he caught a glimpse of her as she helped serve the meal and his heart beat faster. This was not the Elaine he had left a year ago. She was but a girl then, a beautiful innocent girl, but still a child. She was a woman now; her early sorrow had seen to that. But there was kindness in her face as well as the spirit of endurance and it was the kindness as much as the bravery that inspired the respect of those around her. She had a gentle and unassuming dignity to her which naturally inspired respect. Beautiful she still was but it was not a girlish beauty. It was a beauty that sent the color flaming into his cheeks, a beauty which caused a murmur of admiration to sweep through the hall, a beauty which, despite the youth that accompanied it, went a little deeper than smooth hair or bright eyes. It was the beauty of womanhood. No hesitation or affectation, no uncertainty or nervous giddiness marred her firm capable actions, her lovely smile, her obvious happiness.

It was with a start that Lancelot realized that she really was happy. She had recovered from her love for him; time had healed the wound he had somehow thought could never heal, that he had thought would remain as raw and throbbing as the day he had inflicted it. 

"Fool!", he said to himself as confusion and pain began to cloud his mind. "What did you expect? That she would remain untouched by the passage of time and keep you forever in her heart? The one who spurned her?"

Bitterness at his own stupidity began to overwhelm him; the familiar curse of self-hatred rose to his lips as it had so often done these past few years. But this time it was different. His bitterness and hatred were doubled at the startling realization that he loved her. It was fixed in his mind with as much certainty as the indisputable fact that he had no chance with her. 

Her complete indifference and his overwhelming love were realized at the same exact time in his mind, mingling joy with grief so thoroughly that he could not tell where one ended and the other began. They were all one throbbing, beautiful, and painful thing. His emotions were in a tumult; his mind saw with clarity how much he needed her and how much she did not need him. And he felt the heartbreak of Elaine with a despair she had never known. 

He spoke to her when the meal was finished- a simple greeting, that was all. 

And then he waited and inwardly begged that she would know him. Even though he knew she did not love him anymore, he knew enough of her kindness and patience to know she extended it generously to everyone and (even though he knew it was selfish of him) in his shattered state he desperately needed to feel some of it. 

A look, a word! That was all he needed. Or so he said. So he thought. 

"Dear God, let her know me!"

The unspoken cry was a prayer that burst unbidden from his heart-the like of which he had never made before in all his life. 

She did not know him. And the blow shattered him. 

Her smile, lovely and kind as it was, shot through him like a knife and the politeness of her nonrecognition hurt him a thousand times more than any words of reproach and anger ever could. At that moment, he would have welcomed her hatred and rejection if it meant that she knew him. He realized with a dull ache that her kindness, equally extended as it was to everyone, could never satisfy him and that he was foolish to think it could serve as a balm when what he wanted and needed was-

Well, her. 

He realized with sudden, piercing and shattering clarity that he could not live without her and equally as clearly, equally as painfully, he saw he could never have her.  
He could not bring himself to disrupt her happiness with her presence, to force his bent and broken self back in her life, to shatter her peace and her warmth and her light with the mess of a man he knew he was. 

He loved her more than he had ever loved anything in his life and it was that love that helped him leave the room and walk away, gather the remains of his broken heart (love, not loss, had shattered it) and take himself where he could never, ever hurt her again. 

The next morning they found him crumpled on the floor of his room. No one knew the cause of death but the truth was, his heart had given way.


End file.
